A conventional public switched telephone network ("PSTN") is formed by routing trunks or lines between various switching systems. The switching systems are often physically grouped together to form a central office. A central office may connect any combination of lines and trunks, and therefore can be used in local switching systems (for interconnecting lines and trunks) and network switching systems (for interconnecting trunks). For purposes of simplicity, only a local switching system for interconnecting lines and trunks will be further discussed.
Often, a single central office switches literally hundreds or thousands of lines. The central office therefore must arrange the switching hardware in a logical manner so that it may be readily accessed, serviced, or replaced. A typical central office will be housed in a multi-floor building, each floor including several rows of switch frames, each switch frame including several shelves of line cards, and each line card serving multiple lines.
A typical central office also contains a central processing facility, or management console. The management console controls the operation of the equipment in the central office, including the frames and line cards stored therein. For example, the management console may show certain status indicators for an individual line card that inform a technician as to how the card is working or if it is working properly. In this example, an error has occurred in a particular line card. The technician first goes to the management console to view the status indicators and determine the faulty line card. The technician then finds the line card, performs corrective maintenance thereon, and returns to the management console to verify that the line card is working as desired.
To avoid requiring the technician to run back and forth between the line card and the management console, two technicians typically work together, one at the line card and one at the management console, and communicate via radio or other conventional means. This solution is undesirable due to the high labor cost of the two technicians. Also, this solution is inherently prone to errors due to communication failures. Instead, what is needed is a system and method that allows a technician to monitor the status indicators that normally appear on the maintenance console, while working on the line card or other switch component.